Despite technological advances in recent years, evaluating an individual's job performance or productivity in a fair, objective, and comprehensive manner remains a difficult task. Complexity of a job function can also complicate the task of performance evaluation. What is more, if a job function or specialty is somewhat rare or unique, it can be difficult to set a performance standard or find a comparable peer for the individual. As an example, healthcare professionals such as physicians and nurse practitioners typically have distinctive specialties and often perform complex job functions. Thus, it can be difficult to comprehend and gauge the performance levels of these healthcare professionals. In current healthcare systems (e.g., hospitals, hospital systems, integrated delivery networks, etc.), administrators generally have a good understanding of the overall, collective performance at the organization level. However, they do not evaluate the performance of individual healthcare professionals because existing computerized healthcare systems are not designed to track the performance levels of individual healthcare professionals. Consequently, administrators lack viable technological tools to help identify healthcare professionals with inadequate performance levels and initiate remedial processes to improve the performance levels.
For example, in some cases, administrators might be able to spot ‘problem physicians’ based on a limited subset of data or measures. Often times, identification is based on word-of-mouth. The problem with these approaches is that the results tend to be anecdotal and underestimate the true population of physicians that require performance improvement guidance. As discussed above, computerized healthcare systems in place today typically monitor performance at the aggregate (i.e., at the organizational level). Human investigation and research are generally required to identify potential ‘problem physicians’ or the like. The investigation and research process can be tedious and time consuming. Furthermore, manual investigation often does not cover the full spectrum of a physician's job function. As a result, the information gathered may not be accurate or conducive to allowing an administrator to make a fair and comprehensive determination about the overall performance level of the physician. More importantly, in current approaches, the performance of a physician or a group of physicians is typically not evaluated against peers who perform equivalent or similar job functions and/or specialties and who have equivalent or similar patient populations. Because existing performance evaluation processes generally lack peer comparison, physicians tend to dispute performance evaluation results and/or mitigate with an excuse that they had been compared with physicians with different specialties and/or different patient populations.
Another obstacle in evaluating the performance levels of healthcare professionals is the sheer number of hundreds to thousands of healthcare professionals caring for hundreds and thousands of patients for various illnesses on a daily basis within each healthcare system, which can comprise multiple facilities. Given the typical high diversity of cases taken by health care professionals, especially physicians, it can be overwhelmingly time consuming and tedious to evaluate and analyze each individual's performance level in every observable category even within a reasonable time period (e.g., a quarter, 6-month, one year, or two years). While administrators might be able to identify a few individuals with clearly inadequate performance levels within a facility, they are not equipped to timely identify and manage potentially hundreds to thousands of healthcare professionals who are not performing at the generally accepted or specified performance levels. The inability to timely identify healthcare professionals with inadequate performance levels can lead to potential problems in the overall quality of the medicine practiced in these facilities, which in turn may reduce the overall productivity and profitability of the healthcare system.
A need exists for a comprehensive, automated system and method for accurately peer profiling the performance of an individual or other entity employed by an organization. Embodiments of the present invention can address this need and more.